Fuxi

Fuxi is one of the great culture heroes of Chinese tradition, a legendary sage-ruler counted among the Three Sovereigns of the mythical dawn of civilization and credited with founding the arts of settled human life. To him tradition ascribes the invention of hunting and fishing and the domestication of animals, the institution of marriage, and above all the devising of the eight trigrams (bagua), the basic figures underlying the divinatory system of the Yijing (I Ching), which he is said to have derived from patterns observed in the natural world, from the markings of a dragon-horse or the order of heaven and earth.

In much of the tradition he is paired with the goddess Nuwa, as consort or sibling, the two depicted with intertwined serpent-tails and holding the compass and the set-square, emblems of the ordering of the world. Like the other culture heroes, Fuxi belongs to legendary rather than documented history, and his figure gathers up a people's account of how civilization and its fundamental patterns first began.

Fuxi and Nuwa's intertwined serpent tails, familiar from later temple carving, survive in one of their oldest and best preserved forms far from any temple, on silk paintings recovered from Tang dynasty burials at the Astana cemetery near Turfan, on the Silk Road in what is now Xinjiang. The paintings, made for burial rather than public devotion, show the pair with human torsos and coiled, entwined lower bodies, compass and set square in hand, the sun and moon and a scatter of stars filling the space above them, and multiple examples have been recovered from different tombs at the site, suggesting the motif was a standard funerary furnishing there rather than a single artist's invention. Their presence so far from the traditional heartlands of Chinese myth, carried along a trade route where Chinese, Turkic and other populations lived side by side, shows the pair functioning as portable cosmological guarantors of order for the dead, credentials of civilization's basic patterns thought worth taking into the tomb regardless of how distant the burial ground lay from the Yellow River plains where their legend was first told. The Astana paintings remain a principal source for reconstructing how the Fuxi-Nuwa image looked before later, more standardized temple and print versions fixed its familiar form.